Are there any alternatives to implementing Clone in Java?

Question

In my Java project, I have a vector of various types of Traders. These different types of traders are subclasses of the Trader class. Right now, I have a method that takes a

Answer 1

Just add an abstract copy method. You can use covariant return types so that the derived type is specified to return a derived instance, which may or may not be important.

public interface Trader {
    Trader copyTrader();
    ...
}


public final class MyTrader implements Trader {
    MyTrader copyTrader() {
        return new MyTrader(this);
    }
    ...
}

Sometimes you might want to generically deal with a collection of derived type of Trader that needs to clone and then return the a properly typed collection. For that you can use generics in an idiomatic way:

public interface Trader {
    THIS copyTrader();
    ...
}


public final class MyTrader implements Trader {
    public MyTrader copyTrader() {
        return new MyTrader(this);
    }
    ...
}